[open-government] Extracting data from SAP (& other ERP systems) - advice welcome

Thu Jul 7 10:06:26 UTC 2011

Hello.
I work for Unit4 Business Software (one of the big three ERP providers) who deploy Agresso Business World (ABW) and we have a tool (linked4) to produce open data.
Currently it extracts payment data as RDF XML/N3/Turtle serialization for the purposes of meeting the £500 spend requirement. It adheres to the LeGSB payment ontology http://reference.data.gov.uk/def/payment#.
In addition it uses Cube, SKOS, OPMV, VoiD to define datasets, analysis hierachy, provenance, and links.
I know the above because I created and maintain the tool... :-) It's based on Jena and is shortly to be released on SourceForge. We have some sample data at http://linked4.org along with a SPARQL endpoint. Standard stuff which has been done before but we're working with Epimorphics (the minds behind Jena) https://epimorphics.com to explore how people can use semantic data. My short view is creating semantic data is easy doing something with it is hard!
Rough numbers for sectors using Agresso Business World ERP in the UK are 100~ Local Government bodies (i.e. Councils) 300+ Furthe/Higher Education establishments and 100~ Not for Profit. Our tool is used to produce data at Windsor and Maidenhead, Redbridge, Gateshead (all LG's), Southampton University, Department for International Development (DfiD). If you have ABW you can easily produce open data and its one step to linked data.
I'd be happy to contribute my experiences.
Regards.
Dick Murray, Technology Specialist, UNIT4 Business Software

From: David Eaves <david at eaves.ca<mailto:david at eaves.ca>>
Date: 7 July 2011 12:02:02 AM GMT+01:00
To: open-government at lists.okfn.org<mailto:open-government at lists.okfn.org>
Subject: Re: [open-government] Extracting data from SAP (& other ERP systems) - advice welcome
Just wanted to add a +1 from me.

I also think there are people at SAP who are interested in this subject, I'd be happy to ask some of the contacts I know there if they have anyone/resources they could devote to this.

cheers,
dave

On 11-07-05 11:11 PM, Tim McNamara wrote:
An open source project for data excavation seems like an intriguing prospect. I'm surprised that it doesn't already exist. I know that it's fairly simple to export a table, however complex data leads to complex problems.

I would really like to nudge people towards providing written content for the Open Data Manual, rather than events. Events should happen alongside written material, however we need to be able to reach people across the entire world.

I was thinking about short help material:

 - how to export a table to CSV
 - how to generate a CSV file by joining and denormalising two tables

Generating these snippets would be a few hundred words of content. They would provide great value to people looking at diving deeper, because they demonstrate that opening data doesn't need to include the chequebook.

Does my thinking compute?

Tim McNamara
Professional \\  paperlessprojects.com<http://paperlessprojects.com>
Personal \\  @timClicks<http://twitter.com/timClicks>  |  timmcnamara.co.nz<http://timmcnamara.co.nz>

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